If you were hoping to pick up a PlayStation Vita this holiday season, you'd better live in Japan: Sony's Kaz Hirai dropped the bad news in a Japanese press conference that the United States and European markets would see the Vita in 2012 rather than 2011 as previously indicated, though the system still appears to be on track for a 2011 launch in Japan. Hirai indicated that there were no planned price cuts for the PS Vita, in spite of Nintendo's plans to cut the price of the 3DS later this month.
The Vita, with its quad-core Samsung-manufactured SoC, 5" OLED screen, rear touchpad, dual joysticks and optional 3G connectivity, certainly looks appealing on paper, and if the portable gaming market still looked the way it did in 2006 the company would no doubt have a winner on its hands; however, it remains to be seen how it and its more expensive, bigger-budget games compete in the 99-cents-a-game market that smartphones and tablets have created.
If Sony can provide gamers with a well-stocked, easy-to-use, competitively priced app store on the Vita, it may just be able to get around some of the problems that the 3DS has been having - Penny Arcade's Tycho humorously compared that system's online store to "the nightmare an actual online store would have" earlier this week.
Source: Bloomberg
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